5 reasons you should add Team Calendars to Confluence

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A personal calendar is great for keeping track of your schedule—meetings, appointments, dinner plans. What a personal calendar is NOT great for is keeping track of what everyone on your team is doing. With each person’s different projects, leave requests, and travel plans, keeping everyone on the same page is nearly impossible. Trying to juggle all these events is what usually leads to an “Oh Shit!” moment—when you suddenly realize you’re going to miss a deadline, or a feature has to be pulled from an upcoming release. These moments are standard for any group of people attempting to work as a team.

In this blog post, I’ll share how Team Calendars, an add-on for Confluence, our team collaboration platform, can be used to improve team planning and defend against future “Oh Shit” moments.

1. Personal calendars don’t scale for teams

If you’re currently using a personal calendar to keep track of team events like leave, travel, or project milestones, you’re likely aware of these problems.

You have to follow a ton of different calendars

It’s difficult for other teammates to add events

It’s hard for new teammates to discover and subscribe to the calendar

It’s even harder for people from other teams to discover and subscribe to the calendar

The events are disconnected from where you actually do your work

Team Calendars provides one place for teams to track common schedules in Confluence. It’s easy to create a single calendar for your team or project and fill it with different types of events—travel, leave, events, Jira versions, issues and sprints, and more.

You can even add custom event types to your calendar. You can build a better calendar and keep your team aligned with 13 different icons for events like system maintenance, work from home days, company-wide meetings, training sessions, and even your team’s weekly happy hour. If you’ve got an event, there’s an icon for it.

At the end of the day, you and your team can build a single calendar that tracks everything that’s important.

2. You need short and long term vision

Planning a month at a time is standard when it comes to mapping things out on a calendar. But there are times when you need to zoom out and think about the bigger picture, or zoom in and focus on a single day or week. You can simplify your planning with four different calendar views—list, week, month, and timeline—and make it dead simple to track your team’s schedule as macro or as micro as you like.

With the Team Calendars Timeline view you can zoom out to 3 months and improve how you do quarterly planning.

3. Avoid Surprises—Put your team on the same calendar

It’s never been easy to answer, Who’s out of the office today? Checking your company’s clumsy HR system isn’t much of a solution. If you also track your leave with a shared personal calendar, it’s really difficult to understand how absences are going to effect upcoming work.

With all your scheduling in one place, it’s easy to spot conflicts ahead of time and plan accordingly. It’s stressful approaching crunch time of a big project only to discover a key stakeholder is leaving for a week in Hawaii. Having clear foresight really matters when it comes to ensuring projects ship on time.

4. Give everyone a window into Jira

1 in every 2 of our Confluence customers also uses Jira. That means there are tens of thousands of teams that rely on Jira to track the deliverables of their projects, and Confluence to plan, collaborate, and execute on them. Confluence offers deep Jira integration so teams can easily flow between the tools. We’ve put similar thought into how Team Calendars further glues the three experiences together.

Team Calendars surfaces everything your development team is working on to the business teams that live in Confluence, in a view that makes sense to everyone. You can easily add Jira versions and issues, Jira Agile sprints, and any custom date fields to a calendar for everyone to see.

Jira information is always up to date on your Team Calendar. You can even change the dates of your Jira issues from your calendar by dragging and dropping the Jira event.

5. Your calendar should connect to your other work

One of the biggest advantages of Team Calendars is that it exists within the context of your work. It’s easy to enhance your project plans, roadmaps, and team home pages by embedding your calendars into your Confluence pages. Your schedule and your work are always side by side.

Ready to try Team Calendars?

Let your personal calendar do what it does best, and align your people, projects, and events in Team Calendars.